Results of Addison Group’s annual survey spotlight what really matters to employees when it comes to perks. While Silicon Valley may have proliferated the “startup culture” of bottomless coffee, game rooms, napping pods, and other extravagant benefits, respondents seemed to choose the “old standards” as their preferred benefits.
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Why does this matter? “Following the recession, we’ve seen a strong candidates’ market, where companies must increasingly cater to hard-to-find talent,” said Thomas Moran, CEO, Addison Group in a press release by the staffing services company.
“Given the challenges surrounding both attracting and retaining talent, it’s crucial for management, recruitment, and HR to have an intimate understanding of what employees today want from their employers and places of work. [We] commissioned the second edition of our generational workplace survey to get to the core of just that.”
Preferred benefits
This second annual survey revealed that regardless of generation, healthcare benefits led the pack as the most important benefit at 70%, followed, unsurprisingly, by higher salaries at 59%. Vacation packages also ranked highly at 46%, followed by equity packages at 19%.
Surprisingly, childcare support ranked lowest at only 11% overall.
Preferred perks
The survey also asked which perks would sway respondents’ decision to work at a company over another that would pay a higher salary. The results reflected generational differences.
For Millennials, it’s all about the free meals, beverages, and snacks (40%), as well as tuition reimbursement (36%).
Interestingly, Millennials also ranked having a dog-friendly office (14%) higher than a napping room, concierge services, and a playroom complete with ping pong, billiards, and video games.
Millennials also indicated that they valued perks with a social aspect, with nearly twice as many (15%) of these workers marking company-sponsored “happy hours” as important compared to Baby Boomers (8%).
The survey also showed that it is important for an organization to consider so-called “intangible” benefits in creating a desirable place to work, with work-life balance (62%) and flexible work hours (54%) topping the list of leading attributes of respondents’ "ideal company.”
Conversely, attributes that respondents chose a¬s least important were often ones that organizations highlight as a means of recruitment and retention, such as being:
- Socially responsible (29%)
- Well-known (26%)
- Transparent about revenue and/or human resources decisions (25%)
- Supportive of employees’ passions or interests outside of work (15%)
The study, commissioned by Addison Group and executed by Survey Monkey, surveyed 1,496 working Americans born between 1946 and 1995. For more information, visit addisongroup.com.